Today Futuremark, one of the leaders in performance benchmarking software, announced that they had started development on 3DMark for Android. Some of you may remember that Rightware actually acquired 3DMarkMobile last year, but it appears Rightware only purchased the benchmark software and the 3DMark brand still belongs to Futuremark.

The original 3DMarkMobile that we used last year has now become Basemark and Righware has expanded their suite to include tests for the Android OS, GUI performance, and OpenGL ES 2.0 performance. Rightware continues to develop their mobile benchmarks and we hear they have some exciting announcements coming soon.

Back to Futuremark, their new mobile 3DMark will measure gaming performance on Android devices and they hope to develop the benchmark so that results will be comparable with 3DMark for Windows 8.

Jukka MÃ¤kinen, CEO of Futuremark, describe his vision for the future of mobile benchmarks by saying, “We will bring 3DMark to the Android platform with a professional grade benchmark that can be trusted by manufacturers, suppliers and vendors to provide the definitive measure of gaming performance on Android while showcasing the very best in real-time graphics and effects.”

Highlights of 3DMark for Android (working title) include:

Measures gaming performance using rendering, CPU and physics tests

Stunning real-time graphics pushing the OpenGL ES API to the limit

Complementary online service to compare results between devices

Results will be comparable with 3DMark for Windows 8

Currently in development, expected to be released in 2012

Some have argued that synthetic benchmarks are largely useless, but I still think they play some role in determining how today’s hardware will handle future games. The end user experience is always the most important thing, but benchmarks can sometimes help us determine the different strenghts and weaknesses of competing platforms.

Speaking of benchmarks, we are working to finally standardize the suite of tests that our team uses to review Android devices. Which Android benchmarks do you think are the most reliable and which ones would you like to see us use on a regular basis?

Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He resides in Dallas and carries the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One as his daily devices. Ask him a question on Twitter or Google+ and he is likely to respond. | Ethics statement

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OpenGL ES will ,most likely play a very important role in even desktop graphics in the future.
seeing that they are pushing these small mobile GPU’s so far, it makes you wonder what could be done with a ARM desktop.

Graphics card manufacturers spent a lot of resources optimising their drivers for synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark on the desktop – sometimes to the point of perceived “cheating”. I wonder if SoC manufacturers will do the same on mobile, as graphics become more and more important.

Interesting thought, they may. Well I know there are a few custom roms now that you can artificially force high quadrant scores on. I do look for graphics to become much more weighted with SoC getting more popular. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these chips in game systems soon if they keep improving this rapidly.

OpenGL ES will ,most likely play a very important role in even desktop graphics in the future.
seeing that they are pushing these small mobile GPU’s so far, it makes you wonder what could be done with a ARM desktop.

Graphics card manufacturers spent a lot of resources optimising their drivers for synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark on the desktop – sometimes to the point of perceived “cheating”. I wonder if SoC manufacturers will do the same on mobile, as graphics become more and more important.

Interesting thought, they may. Well I know there are a few custom roms now that you can artificially force high quadrant scores on. I do look for graphics to become much more weighted with SoC getting more popular. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these chips in game systems soon if they keep improving this rapidly.